Shell Programming and Scripting

Tricky one:

I want to do several things all at once to blow away a directory (rm -rf <dir>)

1) I want to find all files recursively that have a specific file extension (.ver) for example.
2) Then in that file, I want to grep for an expression ( "sp2" ) for example.
3) Then I want to blow away only that top level directory that contains that .ver file that contains the "sp2" match (the .ver is nested a few deep)


So for example:

A .ver file might be located here:
./KB981322/update/update.ver

and in that file I find the expression "sp2".


I want to blow away (rm -rf ) the top level directory "/KB981322/"

Other update.ver files may contain the expression "sp3" and I do not want to touch those.

I know how to do a find with grep, but not get the top level directory and pass that to rm -rf.

Start with the parent directory (in your case ".") and find all directories under this (eg ./KB981322) if a find turns up a *.ver file that contains "sp2" delete the subdirectory:

Code:

PARENT=.
LOOK=sp2
 
for subdir in "$PARENT"/*
do
    if [ -d "$subdir" ]
    then
        find "$PARENT"/"$subdir" -type f -name "*.var" -print | while read file
        do
            if grep -q "$LOOK" "$file"
            then
                rm -rf "$PARENT"/"$subdir"
                break
            fi
        done
done